The 2007–08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:08) restricted-use data file contains data on a sample of 114,000 undergraduate students and 14,000 graduate and first-professional students. These students were enrolled between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2008 in about 1,730 postsecondary institutions. The data are representative of all undergraduate, graduate, and first professional students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico that were eligible to participate in the federal financial aid programs in Title IV of the Higher Education Act. NPSAS focuses on how students and their families pay for postsecondary education and collects a wide range of demographic information about the nation’s postsecondary students.

In 2021, the RUF was converted from the Microsoft Windows-based Electronic Codebook into flat text data files that can be accessed using statistical software syntax. The RUF includes all of the revised weights and derived variables added since the original release of the data.